


A Swiftly Tilting Planet

by simplyprologue



Series: Careful the Tale You Tell (Children Will Listen) [8]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Babies, Belated Mother's Day Anyway, Charlotte-fic, Domestic, F/M, Gen, Mother's Day, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-30 05:27:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3924550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The bedroom door opens, banging back against the wall – Charlie hasn’t quite grasped the concept of twist and push, tending to place too much emphasis on the <i>pushpushpush</i> aspect of getting through the barrier in front of her – and her toddler runs into the room with her father steps behind her, murmuring his ever-constant reminder of <i>gentle, gentle, gentle.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A Swiftly Tilting Planet

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** I had intended to write something for Mother's Day for these two (well, for Mac) but finals and term papers stole all my time away and I meant to write something yesterday but apparently writing thirty-four pages worth of academic papers will leave you a bit of a scrambled egg. Pippa assures me that being late is just fine, though. So if you have any complaints, take them up with her. 
> 
> I suppose this fic is a bit of a thing that got started on a headcanon. The book series in question by Madeleine L'Engle was one of my favorites as a child. I was rereading _A Wrinkle in Time_ yesterday while looking over another very Mac-centric fic I've been working on, and this happened. The title of this fic is taken from the third book in L'Engle's Time Quintet.

They were her favorite books when she was nine, ten, eleven years old.

Looking back it’s easy to see why – the slightly older girl with mousy hair, glasses, and braces. The missing government worker father, and beautiful, brilliant mother who is wholly intimidating in her successes. The misfit social status and little siblings running amok. The older boy she had a crush on. The adventures to places with oppressive totalizing regimes.

She hid in them when she would stage a tactical retreat to hers and Ainsley’s room in the Embassy housing in East Berlin, brought them along in the two suitcases she was able to bring when she was shuttled off to Catholic boarding school in DC when her father was given assignment in Kabul when she was fourteen. Kept them with her in college, too, if only to keep her sisters’ hands off them. Tucked them into her duffel and carried them through the Middle East and lost them, at last, along with everything else in Islamabad.

When they were putting together the nursery for Charlotte she thought about them, considered buying a set to put on the bookshelves for when she’s older.

But there were other considerations, other worries than what their daughter would want to read in the fourth grade. So she chose softer books, with rounded cardboard corners and soft felt insides, easier stories with more complacent endings and brightly-colored pictures.

 

* * *

 

She’s been drifting for maybe about thirty minutes now, stuck between sleep and wakefulness in an hour much later than she’s slept until in years. Rolling over onto her stomach, she buries her face in Will’s abandoned pillow. If she was more awake, she’d be mildly concerned about the silence ringing through the apartment.

Breathing deeply, she lingers in the place before consciousness.

Until, at last, the slap of small feet against hardwood floor sets a small smile on her face.

The bedroom door opens, banging back against the wall – Charlie hasn’t quite grasped the concept of twist and push, tending to place too much emphasis on the _pushpushpush_ aspect of getting through the barrier in front of her – and her toddler runs into the room with her father steps behind her, murmuring his ever-constant reminder of _gentle, gentle, gentle._

“Ma! Ma!”

She feels the sheets as they’re pulled to one side of the bed, and opens her eyes in time to see Will keep their seventeen month old daughter from using them as a climbing apparatus, lifting her and placing her on top of the mattress.

“Mama _mamama_ —”

Enthusiastically, Charlie crawls across the mattress and into her arms.

“Ma! Day!”

Mac pulls the toddler in towards her, until both their heads fest facing each other on the pillow, close enough that she can lean forward to press a kiss to Charlie’s nose. “Good morning, sweetheart,” she says, sounding as drowsy as she feels.

Charlie gives her a kiss in return, wet and poorly-aimed, landing on her chin. “Ma!”

“Daddy’s been keeping me from you all morning, hasn’t he?” she teases, brushing wisps of blonde hair out of Charlie’s face. “My poor girl.”

Charlie’s response is a slurry of word fragments, but her remark has the intended effect. She feels Will’s weight dip down onto the mattress next to her, and then lean to reach over her when Charlie decides she doesn’t want to stay lying down, bouncing up and towards the end of the bed.

“We went to the park,” he says, scooping Charlie into lap despite her quietly-howled protests. Laughing, Mac turns onto her other side so she can see them. “Who did we see at the park, Charlotte?”

Their daughter stops squirming, and grins widely up at Will. “Ducks.”

“Oh, Daddy took you to see your friends, the ducks?” she asks, stretching out against the mattress, trying to ease the sleepiness from her limbs. Of course it was the ducks, she thinks, and reaches up to touch Charlie’s face again.

“Feed ducks.” Lurching forward, she claps her hands together. “Bread!”

It truly is the little things: the familiarity of a knit blanket that she’s slept with since she was born, or Will picking up one of his guitars and allowing her to pick at the strings, or being taken across the street to the pond with a few slices of stale bread to toss at the ducks quacking as they con children and tourists into saving them the trouble of scavenging for their next meal.

Somehow, they have created a child who is as wondrously happy as she is willful, toddling towards the waterline with chubby hands full of crumbs, daring to stand far closer to the waterfowl than they are strictly comfortable with at times. And always looking at them, making sure that she has either their attention or their approval, that there are smiles on their faces to match the one on hers. All, of course, in the pursuit of ensuring that her duck friends have had enough to eat – taking Charlie to feed the ducks is their favorite weekend activity to have her well and truly tired out for lunch and her subsequent nap.

Mac wonders what Will has planned.

“And I’m sure they were very thankful,” she tells their daughter, pushing herself up until her torso at least is vertical.

Even as he allows their lunging daughter pitch herself forward into her mother’s lap, Will nevertheless keeps one hand on the toddler’s back. “Who else did we see when we were at the park?”

“Scott.” Charlie’s head turns back towards Will for affirmation, her lopsided pigtails swinging.

Mac feels her eyebrows crease together.

“You saw Scott?” she asks, catching Charlie as she climbs up her front, folding her arms around her smaller body to prevent her from cresting over her shoulders. Giggling, Charlie pats her hands on Mac’s face to her get attention. Obligingly, Mac diverts her attention to kiss her on the forehead.

And then another on her cheek, for good measure, as Charlie babbles delightedly in her ear. One word, however, does appear within her stream of syllables. “Present!”

Face filled with silent question, Mac looks back to Will.

“He had to drop something off to me, and the agency’s closed today,” he mumbles in explanation. Mouth quirking into a grin, he pulls lightly on one of Charlie’s pigtails. “Charlie, do you wanna give Mom her present? Do you remember what I said today is?”

Her entire face lights up, and she whispers, “Mama’s Day.”

Mac really can’t help the smile that blooms on her lips, and squeezes Charlie tightly to her. But then she thinks a fraction of a bit harder about the series of events that apparently transpired while she was left to sleep.

“What did you get me that Scott had to be the one to hand it over?” Mac looks up at Will, almost concerned. But the gift-wrapped package that he pulls off the nightstand isn’t in a Tiffany Blue box nor a red Cartier one nor emblazoned with the Harry Winston name, so she decides to not be overly anxious about it.

“It’s from Charlotte, not me.” He shrugs, deliberately nonchalant.

It takes everything that she has in her to not call him a dweeb.

“I’m sure.”

“See, it says _From: Charlotte_ on the tag and everything.” He drops the gift into the hand that isn’t keeping Charlie in her lap – looking at the tag, it does indeed say that. In Will’s handwriting. Then, in a tone of voice that could be described as nervous, he says, “You’ll get your presents from me later.”

Now her curiosity really is piqued.

(She’s now also somewhat certain that there _is_ a Tiffany blue box hiding in the house somewhere, but that’s neither here nor there where Will is concerned – their second first Christmas as a couple he gave her nearly half a million dollars in diamonds that she’s _fairly_ certain he bought after one of her Genoa-retraction-Jerry-Dantana related panic attacks that she could no longer keep hidden from him.

The eight karat diamond necklace he bought her when Charlotte was born is tame by comparison.)

“There’s more?” she asks, rocking Charlie in her arms. “What could be more a gift than sleeping in with this one around to wake us up at the crack of dawn?”

“Sleep, and so much more hon.” He points to the where their toddler is trying to rip the corner of the floral wrapping paper on her gift. “Open it, before she does.”

Mac snorts, flipping the object in her hands, trying to settle Charlie in her lap. “Do you wanna help, baby?”

“Yeah.”

Her child’s answer is accompanied by the sound of paper tearing. After all, there’s nothing that Charlie likes more than parental-approved mess-making. Even if she doesn’t quite _wait_ for their approval, but Mac figures that she hasn’t had the chance to decimate the wrapping on a gift in quite a few months now, so it’s just like doing it for the first time again.

She does have to help Charlie get the paper away from them though. Salvaging a silvery bow that Will had taped on top of the parcel, she pats it down onto Charlie’s blonde head. She shrieks with laughter, her small hands scrabble up to either dislodge it the bow or try to make it more secure, the end result either way being the destruction of one of her pigtails.

“Silly girl,” Mac murmurs in her ear, and then finally looks down at what’s in her hand. “Oh.”

Disentangling her fingers from her hair, Charlie covers the book in Mac’s hands with her own.

“Book!”

“Yes, it’s a book,” she replies absently, her eyes blurring over with tears. Astonished, she looks up at Will. “How did you know—?”

She never mentioned that her own copy of _A Wrinkle in Time_ is long gone, and the copy now resting in her hands is the same edition that her father had purchased initially for her older brother back when he was an attaché at the British Embassy in DC. The familiar first edition dust jacket looks up at her, black and white figures on a deep teal background.

“Jim mentioned that yours got left behind in Pakistan,” he says carefully, voice blunted from displaying much emotion, either because he didn’t expect her to be this close to crying over a book or because he did, and neither of them like Charlie to see them upset. “And I know that it was your favorite growing up, so I had Scott put out feelers for the series at rare books places. I heard about this one when it turned up at auction in London a few weeks ago.”

Sniffling, she opens the book to the title page. “It’s signed.”

“So was yours,” he argues gently; it was another thing her father had done, when he knew he’d be meeting L’Engle at a party in Georgetown during one of her press tours. “And I’ll find the other three.”

“Oh, honey—”

Smiling lopsidedly, she reaches up to cup Will’s cheek with her hand, and bring his mouth to hers the best she can with a squirmy toddler between them. He kisses her softly once, twice, a third time, and rubs his thumbs over her cheeks to dry the few tears that have managed to escape.

“Book, Mama,” Charlie says, completely unperturbed. Craning her neck so that she’s looking straight up at Mac, she grabs a handful of pages and tries to foist the book open to the middle.

“Gentle with the book, sweetheart. It’s very old,” Mac sighs, taking the bulk of the pages out of Charlie’s hand and giving her a single one.

“Turn page?”

“Gently.” Mac wonders when Charlotte will be old enough to curl into her side to be read to from something besides a picture book. This edition has illustrations – she can still remember which pages they’re all on, if she’s being entirely honest – but not nearly enough to hold the interest of a toddler, age-inappropriate topic material aside. “It’s a big girl book. But we can read it when you’re a little bit older. It was my favorite, when I was younger. I lost mine, though, long before you were born.”

“Found.” She jabs her finger at the open pages. “Read?”

“There aren’t that many pictures for you to look at, sweet pea,” she explains softly, flipping through a few pages to show her.

But Charlie is adamant, stubbornly holding onto the book and refusing to let go. “Please?”

Mac sighs again, and then laughs, well aware that Will is watching them. And not in a mindful sort of way, but just because he always _is_ watching, or looking, paying attention to them. And it’s a good thing, a good thing that she _likes_ after a childhood of being shuttled across the globe and separated from her parents and her brother and sisters and an adult life of that, too, constantly coming and leaving the ones that she loves.

And Charlie will have it harder than herself in many respects, and harder than Meg Murry, when it comes to indomitable parents. McAvoy is a household name, and every day she prays that Charlotte won’t have to feel like she must absolutely live up to any of the names that they gave her. (Although, Charlotte Harper McAvoy is pretty indomitable in and of herself.) Mac knows that her parents did their best, but she also knows what it’s like to be the daughter of two people who seem at times a bit too big in the world to be impressed with a child, even their own.

Even after she won her first Peabody, she was still the correspondent whose father helped bring down the Berlin Wall and got the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

So maybe it’s not too early to read this one with Charlie.

(Maybe it’s why her father understood why the book was so important to her in the first place, when she was small.)

Mac turns to the first page, silently betting against herself how long her daughter will hold out before she has to reach for the stack of picture books on her nightstand. “It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt…”

She feels Will’s hand land on her shoulder.

“I’m gonna go get brunch started,” he says, brushing his lips against her temple, and then getting up off the bed. “Take your time.”

Her response is a nod and a smile, before leaning her chin on top of Charlie’s head. Squinting, she fumbles her reading glasses off the top of her alarm clock, and slides them onto her face. “Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky…”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
